Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

teslarati.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 303 posts

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#211

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #186
mbesto wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers. I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream. I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.

Can’t we call it passion and vision instead of “reality distortion field”?

Can we have passion and vison that doesn't need reality distorted and instead follows truth and the laws of physics and logic in our universe?

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#212

Post by modo_mario »

pjkundert wrote: post #140
thedrbrian wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it a lot worse. You can fit a load of people on a subway train versus a model s or x

You’ve got the wrong perspective. From the perspective of the city, the ROI of a subway train is high. From the perspective of an individual, the ROI of using my own car in a tunnel, exactly when I want to, without parking, waiting, embarking, smelling the vagrants, disembarking, walking or getting a cab, ... Priceless!

>Priceless!

Weird then that he didn't ask the individual to pay for it.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#213

Post by modo_mario »

drcross wrote: post #142
astrodust wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon's making bold claims about how he's going to disrupt the tunnelling industry but so far the results are unimpressive to say the least. Tunnel boring is a complex, multi-faceted civil engineering discipline with a large number of well-funded firms that are aggressively competing and innovating. In this space Elon is utterly insignificant. The ELI5 version is: "Elon thinks he can dig tunnels faster and cheaper tha…

You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

He bought the title of founder in title in a way that the original founders couldn't use it so saying he bootstrapped it is a bit much same with saying it's the first electric car company.

He has a knack for attracting nice attention and generally is a great marketeer for his brands and himself as a brand.

He's also great at extracting government funds.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#214

Post by thereisnospork »

bluGill wrote: post #183
toasterlovin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ve been building houses for millennia and construction is still notorious for not going according to plan. One-off projects are just hard to get to go as planned.

Lesson: don't do one-off projects. Find a project that meets you needs, and copy it. Make minor tweaks to their design to fit your needs, but copy as much as possible. Houses typically go according to plan because so many of the processes and parts are standard. Even large mansions can go according to plan if you have good management (note that cheap management is rewarded for change orders and thus will ensure thing…

Imo big infrastructure needs like roads and subways shouldn't be done on a project basis at all. For instance, NYC shouldn't bid and build out massive contracts for a few km of subway. They should own a boring machine and add 10-100m of tunnels a week, every week[0]. (numbers arbitrary) You can shake so much overhead around project start-up and shut-down and it will be a long time before NYC (nevermind someplace like SF) has saturated the demand for public transit.

[0] Best example of this sort of logic that I have seen implemented is painting the golden gate bridge, just one properly sized and experienced crew painting from one end to the other and back again without the boondoggle.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#215

Post by asdff »

SECProto wrote: post #174
Rexxar wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like tunnels, there will be 200km of tunnels built by 21 boring machines at the same time between 2020 and 2030 around Paris : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express

Any detail specifically on the tunnels? That just mentioned 200km of track, but not whether above or below grade

all tunnels are below grade

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#216

Post by asdff »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #186
mbesto wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers. I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream. I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.

Can’t we call it passion and vision instead of “reality distortion field”?

Passion and vision are a part of it, but the reality distortion field encompasses everything good, bad, and ugly about musk that he offers to the public, unsavory tweets included.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#217

Post by Dylan16807 »

fctorial wrote: post #161
BurningFrog wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that road access is severely underpriced. If you had to pay for road access, you could easily set the price to where demand meets supply, and all roads would have well flowing traffic 24/7. But of course "induced demand" happens when the price is $0. The same would occur for bread, phones or pianos at that price point.

Roads do have a price, and it does increase with demand. What is the worth of 10 minutes of your time?

The problem is that you don't pay for the slowdown you cause to everyone else. You're offloading that cost, so you keep choosing to use the road well beyond the point where traffic should be increasing.

To make up for that, we can charge people at the entrance point. But charging people time is basically impossible, so money is used instead.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#218

Post by lucas_membrane »

The article says that two one-mile lengths will be constructed and that now they have completed more than 6 football fields (say 600 meters). That is not quite 20% of two miles, so the math may be more leading edge than the shovel. The article also says that the equipment has been underground "for months," so it doesn't get me thinking that tunnels are ready to conquer widespread problems on a large scale soon.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#219

Post by asdff »

spectrum1234 wrote: post #181
gamblor956 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk never learned that most of the cost of subways is the stations and supporting infrastructure, not digging the tunnel itself. Musk has not proposed any improvements to the expensive parts of tunneling.

This is completely wrong. The biggest costs to tunnels is bureaucracy. Simply using private funds without numerous contractors can decreases costs by an order of magnitude with no technological improvements.

Simply using public funds to employ a workforce rather than contract one would save the most money due to eliminating the need to house and feed shareholders and turn a profit, but voters seem to like the contractor profiteering model even if it eats the public purse.

NYC only has a big subway system because it gobbled up all the failing private railways over the years. LA used to have the largest rail transportation network in the world, it was private, and it too failed to turn a profit and failed. Transportation runs at a loss.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#220

Post by annon »

jacques_chester wrote: post #107
mdszy wrote: post #9

So they're halfway through digging the tunnel, not halfway through doing all the other things to make the tunnel actually as useful as musk is claiming. This all just seems like subways from first principles but probably worse.

If you want to build subways in less time for less money, the from-first-principles conclusion is that cut-and-cover is stupendously cheaper and quicker than tunneling. But nobody wants to be the one who signs off on "long sections of major roads closed for months at a time over a period of several years".

You can’t really do multiple layers of tunnels with cut and cover. It also requires the tunnels to follow where you can actually cut instead of the most direct route.
Post reply on HN